Twitch Problems, As Viewer

I have been using Twitch quite frequently in the last couple month. It’s quite different from Youtube because what you watch is real-time action with a delay for seconds or minutes. That mean any mistake made in the live stream can’t be undone or edited. But hey, that what make it different from Youtube. You can enjoy the real-time interaction between streamer and the viewer in real-time. And I found that it’s quite enjoyable.

In this post, I won’t write on how great twitch is or its strength compared to the other site similar site. Rather, I want to discuss any problem I discover when using it. Just like any other great product out here, Twitch has some issue and always will, but not something too serious, just inconvenient. And I will discuss that in this post.

Before we begin, I must warn you that this isn’t some hate post about Twitch or something like that. Just my analysis for the Twitch and what can be improved to increase user experience to the Twitch user. Not all of the issue I write in this post has a solution, at least for now.

So, with that in mind, let’s get started.

Chat Move Too Fast

Chat in Twitch channel, especially the popular one is too fast to follow. The more popular the channel is, the faster chat moving. People like me, who like to follow the conversation and enjoy streamer and viewer interaction, can’t keep up and enjoy that kind of thing. Mostly, the viewer just spams the chat and streamer just quick-filter and ignore most of the chat.

Not that it’s streamer or Twitch or viewer fault . It just the weakness from live streaming. I don’t think there is an easy way to fix this so I doubt it will be addressed anytime soon.

In a nonreal-time video like in the Youtube, comments can be ordered by top comment or newest. This is good since we can just get smaller comments to read, even tough some top comment usually contain hate or flame or spam comment. I know it’s not perfect, at least it a solution and it can be improved.

But Twitch chat? I don’t think you can fix this with the same way you fix offline content like on Youtube.

Boring Ads, Its Too Few

Ads or Advertisements especially the video one is pretty annoying. They disturb the viewer when watching the video. It’s fine if it in the beginning, but when it in the middle of the video, you can get interrupted. Just like TV.

I hate ads and don’t want to watch any ads. But it not like I don’t understand why they put ads and blame or dislike them for that. It just I personally don’t really enjoy watching with ads in it. That why even if I hate it I don’t use Adblock to block them. Well, I still use them for annoying and disturbing or shady ads, but mostly I don’t use them at all.

But the ads in twitch is too few. Sometimes I can watch the same ads 5 times in a row. This is, of course, bad for the user. It will make the user think the ads played too often. Even if you play them every 2 hours, users can become really aware of them if they meet the same ads too often. Heck, I’m sure they remember and can say all the word that said in the ads.

No Old Stream?

Twitch removed the stream that more than 2 weeks old by default unless the streamer set the video to be highlighted. I don’t know if this is because they can’t store that much video or because they think twitch is more like live video streaming rather than like video streaming like youtube so it’s fine to remove very old videos.

Either way, for a user like me, who watch a video so much that it become my TV rather than actual TV and want to watch the older video since the streamer I watch don’t stream that long. At least not as long as I play the stream.

I don’t blame them since they have a life too, but I want to watch more. So I watch their old video to compensate that. But I can’t since Twitch remove the video that more than 2 weeks.

This is not experience breaking, but it would be nice if they don’t remove them. I’m sure I’m not the only one who do this.

Buffering Problem

This one of the thing I found really weird. I have a decent internet connection, not too good but good enough to be able to stream video without any hiccup. But I still have a problem with Twitch.

I don’t know why but high or source quality is not available for me because it always buffering. FYI, Twitch High resolution is only at 720p. I can play 2K videos without any problem on Youtube.

I have an idea why this happen but I’m not too sure since I don’t really test it with a proper test. But I think that the problem is not about the internet speed, rather than internet latency. By latency, I mean that how long it takes from my computer to sent request to receive the response from the server.

How do I know this? I tried to increase my buffer size when streaming and this problem has gone completely. No buffer, no hiccup. Just smooth stream video. If my internet speed is the problem, even if I increase buffer size there is no way it won’t buffer since it can’t keep up with the video. But if I increase buffer and it can be fixed, then there is something in the

But if I increase the buffer size and it is fixed, then there is something in the stream process that makes downloading slower or don’t have enough time to download it. The only thing that comes to my mind is response speed.

I don’t know if this true or not, but this issue really exists

Heavy CPU Usage

I only realize this problem recently since I think that nowadays every render thing like image, video, or animation use hardware acceleration to increase their performance. Surprisingly, Twitch didn’t use hardware acceleration, at least not for the core process like rendering.

How do I know? See this CPU usage in my PC.

Almost 50% for a single video? I don’t believe it will use this much resource to render the video unless they don’t use hardware acceleration.

I have been making my own video player back when I was in high school for fun and I know how heavy it is to play high-quality video. But then I improve them when in college to use hardware acceleration rather than a normal render. The result is pretty much I can say it doesn’t really use CPU resource. It still does of course, but it so small that it not that noticeable.

As far as I know, Twitch is using flash for playing it videos. But I think that Flash is using hardware acceleration to render so I don’t think this is Flash issue.

According to this Reddit post, there is 2 class you can use in Flash to render video. “Video” and “StageVideo” class. Class “Video” one is too complex to be fully optimized using hardware acceleration. It can but not all. “StageVideo” can and mostly guaranteed to be hardware accelerated. I don’t know why, but it seems that Twitch choose it better to use “Video” rather than “StageVideo”.

This way, the only way for it to be fixed is using a different client to stream to twitch site like livestreamer, or wait for Twitch to fix it.

I think this is all the problem I find and encounter while using Twitch. Once again, this post is not some hate post or critic post to blame or something, just some kind of analysis on Twitch.

If you have any further question or suggestion, you can write it in the comment section bellow. Thank you for reading.

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